Collection of items swallowed and regurgitated by Western Gulls recovered on the (relatively remote) Farallon Islands off the coast of Northern California. From Los Farallones blog, photo by Scarlett Hutchin.

Still wading through the Anningiana. Yesterday was the 1st birthday of a neighbor. We ate strawberry cupcakes. The subject of other May 21 birthdays came up and I mentioned Anning. “Who is that?” asked the father of the birthday boy. Under the gun, I stammered “Oh, um, she was a 19th century fossil hunter … she’s kinda famous.” My wife, without missing a beat, “Well, in our house she is anyway.”

Who broke the window feeder

jomobimo:

48. Silkworm Moth, The Book of Butterflies, Sphinxes and Moths, 1832-34

Mary Anning’s notebook contains several rather distinctive essays and poems. The authorship of these have often been attributed to Anning herself (for example see this fine recent biographical sketch by Davis [2009]) but it appears more likely that she actually transcribed them from other publications. I guess this is the kind of thing people did before Tumblr.

This poem (the first few lines of which are shown in Mary’s hand above) is particularly entertaining, at least assuming that you are hip to inside jokes about early 19th Century geologists and geological debates. It is a satirical ode to Roderick Murchison, the Scottish geologist who was knighted in 1846.

It appears to have been composed by a Cambridge physician writing under the pseudonym “The Travelling Bachelor” and was originally published in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1846. It was transcribed by Anning in the same year, or shortly thereafter.

Encomium Murchisonaum

Who first surveyed the Russian states?
And made the great Azoic dates?
And worked the Scandinavian states?
Sir Roderick

Who calculated nature’s shocks?
And proved the low Silurian rock
Detritus of more ancient flocks?
Sir Roderick

Who knows of what all rocks consist?
And sees his way where all is mist
About the metamorphic schist?
Sir Roderick

Who draws distinctions clear and nice
Between the old and new gneiss?
And talks no nonsense about ice.
Sir Roderick

Let others then, their stand maintain,
Work all for glory, nought for gain,
And each finds faults, but none complain.
Sir Roderick

Let Sedgwick say how things began,
Defend the old creation plan,
And smash the new one, if he can.
Sir Roderick

Let Buckland set the land to rights,
Find meat and peas, and starch in blights,
And future food in coprolites.
Sir Roderick

Let Agassiz appreciate tails,
And like the virgin old the scales,
And Owen draw the teeth of whales.
Sir Roderick

Take Thou thy orders hard to spell,
And titles more then man can spell.
I wish all such were earned so well.
Sir Roderick

entropicsyncretism:

Mary Anning’s Icthyosaur (at the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, UK)

kindofamenace:

“Letter and drawing from Mary Anning announcing the discovery of a fossil animal now known as Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus, 26 December 1823”

via Mary Anning

spudd64:

This is absolutely delightful!

Used to have this one… wonder what happened to it?

Prospective wrens.

Excuse me little hombre.

Wing-assisted inclined running! Without flight feathers! (at Anchorage Trail)